Preparing your mind to survive disasters

Your property is prepared, you have practised your survival plan and the emergency survival kit is packed and on stand-by. But are you really ready for a disaster?

The decisions you make during an emergency are important to your survival, which is why you need to prepare your brain and your emotions.

Trauma psychologist Dr Rob Gordon says it's a matter of being clear in your thinking, as you prepare.

"People need to decide 'do I want to put my life in danger'," he says.

"If they say 'yes, I want to hang onto my house', then they need to be very clear that what is going to confront them is something enormously challenging.

"They've got to have that confidence and determination, and the confidence should be placed in the fact that they have very good reason to believe that their house is defendable."

The two brains

Dr Gordon says your brain changes when faced with a disaster from normal and reasoned mode, to a focus on survival.

"As soon as we have a threat, or even a very unusual and surprising experience, the adrenaline is activated and we move into a much more primitive part of our brain," he says.

"It's a second brain if you like, that is sitting quietly in the background but will take over when there's a need to be faster, quickly, stronger and braver than we need to be in normal circumstances.

"What people don't realise is that there may be a big gulf between these two systems."

Dr Gordon says people need to understand that when they confront a disaster they won't be able to think carefully and make strategic decisions easily.

He says a reaction to the event will depend on a person's experience or state of mind.

Generally, there's two reactions. Some people focus on threat and prepare themselves to react quickly, others face a period of denial.

"We do the best we can in our normal life to remove threats from our day-to-day life, to make it secure, predictable and comfortable," Dr Gordon says.

"When a threat appears, if we're going to take it seriously we have to step out of that system and accept the reality that I'm facing a very dangerous situation. Something really bad could happen."

During the disaster

Dr Rob Gordon says you must take in the information about the situation at hand, rather than relying on your assumptions. It's easy to think nothing bad will happen during a disaster.

"People cannot imagine what it's going to be like, so there's a kind of natural tendency to make light of something that other people are taking seriously, when we haven't experienced it," he says.

Dr Gordon says you should keep check of feelings of pain, hunger or fatigue, so you don't place yourself in a situation you can't deal with.

"Because their attention has all gone out into the environment, they actually lose the sense of importance of their own safety... therefore they can't really pursue the safety of keeping themselves alive," he says.

"There needs to be someone to make the decision and tell the family what we are doing now."

Dr Gordon, who found himself under threat during the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, says it's important to listen to instructions and information, as well as learning from what has happened before.

"It has nothing to do with how intelligent or how experienced you are, if your adrenalin is high enough your problem solving capacity will disappear," he says.

"I think it's very important that people have a sense of the unpredictability and if they're going to tackle it, they need to be very clear that they need to make the kind of preparations we need for a serious life-threatening encounter.

"It's so important for these stories to be told and the footage to be shown so that people have their assumptions pushed aside and replaced with real experiences. Even if they're other people's experiences."

ABC Emergency delivers official warnings and alerts and publishes emergency coverage sourced from ABC Local Radio and ABC News.

In carving her own path to the top of the political game, Julie Bishop has learned to be as bold, confident and skilful as anyone in Parliament — traits all on display in a cutting final speech, writes Annabel Crabb.